At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. “I walk around the neighborhood this time of…

At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. “I walk around the neighborhood this time of year and I look in the windows and I feel homesick,” a man in his seventies said to me recently. With his home — its kitchen counter and its checkered dishtowels, soft blankets on the bed he shares with his wife, old dog dreaming and atwitch on a pillow in the livingroom — just a few blocks away. Homesick for what, then? For a long-gone childhood sense of home? For a long-gone childhood? For some only-imagined sense of comfort and safety? (May we all, all of us, find it and have it.) The nights are long. Late afternoon brings the deep and aching blue. The original hearth burns somewhere.

[Print: Uncle Henry’s (Monhegan Island) by Mary Teichman, 2013]